Artificial Intelligence

Brick-and-mortar and online retail channels facing an inevitable and inexorable convergence.

Retailers are more likely to increase their marketing budgets for Amazon than they are for Google, Bing, Facebook or Twitter.

Emerging economies continue to drive global digital payment transactions — and momentum shows no signs of slowing.

What is the purpose of your business? If you are a retailer and your immediate answer is “to sell more products,” you may find times getting tougher in the months and years ahead.

Consumers are becoming more digitally influenced on a seemingly daily basis — but omnichannel retailers find themselves hard-pressed to keep up the pace. Retailers need to meet their needs across all touchpoints, and create a frictionless shopping experience despite where the shopping journey starts and ends.   

1-800-Flowers.com continues to embrace the conversational commerce game.    The gifting brand is preparing to launch a program that will enable its customers to place orders via Google Assistant on their Android phones and iPhones. Using their voice or text, they can access a menu of gifting categories, and place orders for delivery nationwide. The service also enables users to specify same-day delivery or schedule a gift’s arrival for a future date.  

In a move to step up their customer experiences, more retailers are embracing artificial intelligence (AI).   This was according to the third quarterly “2017 E-commerce Performance Index,” a report from SLI Systems.   According to the data, 54% of companies reported they are using or plan to add AI in the future. The largest group of these respondents (20%) expect to add AI within the next 12 months.